Democratic Ideals and Reality: A Study in the Politics of Reconstruction

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DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY

A STUDY IN THE POLITICS OF RECONSTRUCTION

BY

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BY THE SAME AUTHOR

BRITAIN AND THE BRITISH SEAS.

Second Edition. The Clarendon Press.

I. Perspective

I

PERSPECTIVE

Our memories are still full of the vivid detail of an all-absorbing warfare; there is, as it were, a screen between us and the things which happened earlier even in our own lives. But the time has at last come to take larger views, and we must begin to think of our long War as of a single great event, a cataract in the stream of history. The last four years have been momentous, because they have been the outcome of one century and the prelude to another. Tension between the nations had slowly accumulated, and, in the language of diplomacy, there has now been a détente. The temptation of the moment is to believe that unceasing peace will ensue merely because tired men are determined that there shall be no more war. But international tension will accumulate again, though slowly at first; there was a generation of peace after Waterloo. Who among the diplomats round the Congress table at Vienna in 1814 foresaw that Prussia would become a menace to the world? Is it possible for us so to grade the stream bed of future history as that there shall be no more cataracts? That, and no smaller, is the task before us if we would have posterity think less meanly of our wisdom than we think of that of the diplomats of Vienna.

The great wars of history—we have had a world-war about every hundred years for the last four centuries—are the outcome, direct or indirect, of the unequal growth of nations, and that unequal growth is not wholly due to the greater genius and energy of some nations as compared with others; in large measure it is the result of the uneven distribution of fertility and strategical opportunity upon the face of our Globe. In other words, there is in nature no such thing as equality of opportunity for the nations. Unless I wholly misread the facts of geography, I would go further, and say that the grouping of lands and seas, and of fertility and natural pathways, is such as to lend itself to the growth of empires, and in the end of a single World Empire. If we are to realise our ideal of a League of Nations which shall prevent war in the future, we must recognise these geographical realities and take steps to counter their influence. Last century, under the spell of the Darwinian theory, men came to think that those forms of organisation should survive which adapted themselves best to their natural environment. To-day we realise, as we emerge from our fiery trial, that human victory consists in our rising superior to such mere fatalism.

Civilisation is based on the organisation of society so that we may render service to one another, and the higher the civilisation the more minute tends to be the division of labour and the more complex the organisation. A great and advanced society has, in consequence, a powerful momentum; without destroying the society itself you cannot suddenly check or divert its course. Thus it happens that years beforehand detached observers are able to predict a coming clash of societies which are following convergent paths in their development. The historian commonly prefaces his narrative of war with an account of the blindness of men who refused to see the writing on the wall, but the fact is, that, like every other going concern, a national society can be shaped to a desired career while it is young, but when it is old its character is fixed and it is incapable of any great change in its mode of existence. To-day all the nations of the world are about to start afresh; is it within the reach of human forethought so to set their courses as that, notwithstanding geographical temptation, they shall not clash in the days of our grandchildren?

In our anxiety to repudiate the ideas historically associated with the Balance of Power, is there not perhaps some danger that we should allow merely juridical conceptions to rule our thoughts in regard to the League of Nations? It is our ideal that justice should be done between nations, whether they be great or small, precisely as it is our ideal that there should be justice between men, whatever the difference of their positions in society. To maintain justice as between individual men the power of the State is invoked, and we now recognise, after the failure of international law to avert the Great War, that there must be some power or, as the lawyers say, some sanction for the maintenance of justice as between nation and nation. But the power which is necessary for the rule of law among citizens passes easily into tyranny. Can we establish such a world power as shall suffice to keep the law between great and small States, and yet shall not grow into a world tyranny? There are two roads to such a tyranny, the one the conquest of all other nations by one nation, the other the perversion of the very international power itself which may be set up to coerce the lawless nation. In our great replanning of human society we must recognise that the skill and opportunity of the robber are prior facts to the Law of Robbery. In other words, we must envisage our vast problem as business men dealing with realities of growth and opportunity, and not merely as lawyers defining rights and remedies.

My endeavour, in the following pages, will be to measure the relative significance of the great features of our Globe as tested by the events of history, including the history of the last four years, and then to consider how we may best adjust our ideals of freedom to these lasting realities of our Earthly Home. But first we must recognise certain tendencies of human nature as exhibited in all forms of political organisation.

II. Social Momentum

II

SOCIAL MOMENTUM

'To him that hath shall be given.'

In the year 1789 the lucid French People, in its brain-town of Paris, saw visions, generous visions—Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. But presently French Idealism lost its hold on Reality, and drifted into the grip of Fate, in the person of Napoleon. With his military efficiency Napoleon restored order, but in doing so organised a French Power the very law of whose being was a denial of Liberty. The story of the great French Revolution and Empire has influenced all subsequent political thought; it has seemed a tragedy in the old Greek sense of a disaster predestined in the very character of Revolutionary Idealism.

When, therefore, in 1848, the peoples of Europe were again in a vision-seeing mood, their idealism was of a more complex nature. The principle of Nationality was added to that of Liberty, in the hope that liberty might be secured against the overreaching organiser by the independent spirit of nations. Unfortunately, in that year of revolutions, the good ship Idealism again dragged her anchor, and by and by was swept away by Fate, in the person of Bismarck. With his Prussian efficiency Bismarck perverted the new ideal of German Nationality, just as Napoleon had perverted the simpler French ideals of Liberty and Equality. The tragedy of National Idealism, which we have just seen consummated, was not, however, predestined in the disorder of Liberty, but in the materialism, commonly known as Kultur, of the organiser. The French tragedy was the simple tragedy of the breakdown of Idealism; but the German tragedy has, in truth, been the tragedy of the substituted Realism.

In 1917 the Democratic Nations of the whole Earth thought they had seen a great harbour light when the Russian Czardom fell and the American Republic came into the War. For the time being, at any rate, the Russian Revolution has gone the common revolutionary way, but we still put our hope in Universal Democracy. To the eighteenth-century ideal of Liberty, and the nineteenth-century ideal of Nationality, we have added our twentieth-century ideal of the League of Nations. If a third tragedy were to ensue, it would be on a vast scale, for democratic ideals are to-day the working creed of the greater part of humanity. The Germans, with their Real-Politik, their politics of reality—something other than merely practical politics—regard that disaster as being sooner or later inevitable. The War Lord and the Prussian military caste may have been fighting for the mere maintenance of their power, but large and intelligent sections of German society have acted under the persuasion of a political philosophy which was none the less sincerely held because we believed it to be wrong. In this War German anticipations have proved wrong in many regards, but that has been because we have made them so by a few wise principles of government, and by strenuous effort, notwithstanding our mistakes in policy. Our hardest test has yet to come. What degree of International Reconstruction is necessary if the world is long to remain a safe place for democracies? And in regard to the internal structure of those democracies, what conditions must be satisfied if we are to succeed in harnessing to the heavy plough of Social Reconstruction the ideals which have inspired heroism in this War? There can be no more momentous questions. Shall we succeed in soberly marrying our new Idealism to Reality?

Idealists are the salt of the Earth; without them to move us, society would soon stagnate and civilisation fade. Idealism has, however, been associated with two very different phases of temper. The older idealisms, such as Buddhism, Stoicism, and Mediæval Christianity, were based on self-denial; the Franciscan Friars vowed themselves to Chastity, Poverty, and Service. But modern democratic idealism, the idealism of the American and French Revolutions, is based on self-realisation. Its aim is that every human being shall live a full and self-respecting life. According to the preamble of the American Declaration of Independence, all men are created equal and endowed with the rights of liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

These two tendencies of idealism have corresponded historically with two developments of reality. In older times the power of nature over man was still great. Hard reality put limits to his ambitions. In other words the world as a whole was poor, and resignation was the only general road to happiness. The few could, no doubt, obtain some scope in life, but only at the cost of the serfdom of the many. Even the so-called Democracy of Athens and the Platonic Utopia were based on domestic and industrial slavery. But the modern world is rich. In no small measure man now controls the forces of nature, and whole classes, formerly resigned to their fate, have become imbued with the idea that with a fairer division of wealth there should be a nearer approach to equality of opportunity.

This modern reality of human control over nature, apart from which democratic ideals would be futile, is not wholly due to the advance of scientific knowledge and invention. The greater control which man now wields is conditional, and not absolute like the control of nature over man by famine and pestilence. Human riches and comparative security are based to-day on the division and co-ordination of labour, and on the constant repair of the complicated plant which has replaced the simple tools of primitive society. In other words, the output of modern wealth is conditional on the maintenance of our social organisation and capital. Society is a 'going concern,' and no small part of our well-being may be compared with the intangible 'goodwill' of a business. The owner of a business depends on the habits of his cus no less than on the regular running of the machinery in his factory; both must be kept in repair, and when in repair they have the value of the 'going concern'; but should the business stop, they have merely a break-up value—the machinery becomes so much scrap metal, and the goodwill is reduced to the book debts.

Society reposes on the fact that man is a creature of habit. By interlocking the various habits of many men, society obtains a structure which may be compared with that of a running machine. Mrs. Bouncer was able to form a simple society for the occupation of a room, because Box slept by night and Cox by day, but her society was dislocated when one of her lodgers took a holiday, and for the nonce changed his habit. Let any one try to realise what would happen to himself if all those on whom he depends—the postmen, railwaymen, butchers, bakers, printers, and very many others—were suddenly to vary their settled routines; he will then begin to appreciate in how great a degree the power of modern man over nature is due to the fact that society is a 'going concern,' or, in the language of the engineer, has momentum. Stop the running long enough to throw men's habits out of gear with one another, and society would quickly run down to the simple reality of control by nature. Vast numbers would die in consequence.

Productive power, in short, is a far more important element of reality in relation to modern civilisation than is accumulated wealth. The total visible wealth of a civilised country, notwithstanding the antiquity of some of its treasures, is generally estimated as equal to the output of not more than seven or eight years. The significance of this statement does not lie in its precise accuracy, but in the rapid growth of its practical meaning for modern men, owing to their dependence on a machinery of production, mechanical and social, which in the past four or five generations has become increasingly delicate and complicated. For every advance in the application of science there has been a corresponding change in social organisation. It was by no mere coincidence that Adam Smith was discussing the division of labour when James Watt was inventing the steam-engine. Nor, in our own time, is it by blind coincidence that beside the invention of the internal combustion engine—the key to the motor-car, submarine, and aeroplane—must be placed an unparalleled extension of the credit system. Lubrication of metal machinery depends on the habits of living men. The assumption of some scientific enthusiasts that the study of the humane arts has ceased to be important will not bear examination; the management of men, high and low, is more difficult and more important under the conditions of modern reality than it ever was.

We describe the managers of the social machine as Organisers, but under that general term are commonly included two distinct categories. In the first place, we have Administrators, who are not strictly organisers at all—begetters, that is to say, of new organs in an organism. It is the function of the administrator to keep the running social machine in repair and to see to its lubrication. When men die, or for reasons of ill-health or old age retire, it is his duty to fill the vacant places with men suitably trained beforehand. A foreman of works is essentially an administrator. A Judge administers the Law, except in so far as in fact, though not in theory, he may make it. In the work of the administrator, pure and simple, there is no idea of progress. Given a certain organisation, efficiency is his ideal—perfect smoothness of working. His characteristic disease is called 'Red Tape.' A complicated society, well administered, tends in fact to a Chinese stagnation by the very strength of its momentum. The goodwill of a long-established and well-managed business may often be sold for a large sum in the market. Perhaps the most striking illustration of social momentum is to be seen in the immobility of markets themselves. Every seller wishes to go where buyers are in the habit of congregating in order that he may be sure of a purchaser for his wares. On the other hand, every buyer goes, if he can, to the place where sellers are wont to assemble in order that he may buy cheaply as the result of their competition. The authorities have often tried in vain to decentralise the markets of London.

In order to appreciate the other type of organiser, the Creator of social mechanism, let us again consider for a moment the common course of Revolutions. A Voltaire criticises the running concern known as French Government; a Rousseau paints the ideal of a happier society; the authors of the great Encyclopédie prove that the material bases for such a society exist. Presently the new ideas take possession of some well-meaning enthusiasts—inexperienced, however, in the difficult art of changing the habits of average mankind. They seize an opportunity for altering the structure of French society. Incidentally, but unfortunately, they slow down its running. Stoppage of work, actual breakage of the implements of production and government, removal of practised administrators, and substitution of misfitting amateurs combine to reduce the rate of production of the necessaries of life, with the result that prices rise, and confidence and credit fall. The Revolutionary leaders are, no doubt, willing enough to be poor for a time in order to realise their ideals, but the hungry millions rise up around them. To gain time the millions are led to suspect that the shortage is due to some interference of the deposed powers, and the Terror inevitably follows. At last men become fatalist, and, abandoning ideals, seek some organiser who shall restore efficiency. The necessity is reinforced by the fact that foreign enemies are invading the national territory, and that less production and relaxed discipline have reduced the defensive power of the State. But the organiser needed for the task of reconstruction is no mere administrator; he must be able to design and make, and not merely to repair and lubricate social machinery. So Carnot, who 'organises victory,' and Napoleon with his Code Civil, win eternal fame by creative effort.

The possibility of organisation in the constructive sense depends on discipline. Running society is constituted by the myriad interlocking of the different habits of many men; if the running social structure is to be altered, even in some relatively small respect, a great number of men and women must simultaneously change various of their habits in complementary ways. It was impossible to introduce Daylight Saving except by an edict of Government, for any partial adherence to the change of hour would have thrown society into confusion. The achievement of Daylight Saving was, therefore, dependent on social discipline, which is thus seen to consist not in the habits of men but in the power of simultaneous and correlated change of those habits. In an ordered State the sense of discipline becomes innate, and the police are but rarely called upon to enforce it. In other words, social discipline, or the alteration of habit at will or command, itself becomes a habit. Military discipline, in so far as it consists of single acts at the word of command, is of a simpler order, but the professional soldier knows well the difference between habitual discipline and even the most intelligent fighting by quick-trained men.

In times of disorder the interlocking of productive habits breaks down step by step, and society as a whole becomes progressively poor, though robbers of one kind or another may for a while enrich themselves. Even more serious, however, is the failure of the habit of discipline, for that implies the loss of the power of recuperation. Consider to what a pass Russia was brought by a year of cumulative revolutions; her condition was like that terrible state of paralysis when the mind still sees and directs, but the nerves fail to elicit any response from the muscles. A nation does not die when so smitten, but the whole mechanism of its society must be reconstituted, and that quickly, if the men and women who survive its impoverishment are not to forget the habits and lose the aptitudes on which their civilisation depends. History shows no remedy but force upon which to found a fresh nucleus of discipline in such circumstances; but the organiser who rests upon force tends inevitably to treat the recovery of mere efficiency as his end. Idealism does not flourish under his rule. It was because history speaks plainly in this regard, that so many of the idealists of the last two generations have been internationalist; the military recovery of discipline is commonly achieved either by conquest from another national base or incidentally to a successful national resistance to foreign invasion.

The great organiser is the great realist. Not that he lacks imagination—very far from that; but his imagination turns to 'ways and means,' and not to elusive ends. His is the mind of Martha and not of Mary. If he be a Captain of Industry the counters of his thought are labour and capital; if he be a General of Armies they are units and supplies. His organising is aimed at intermediate ends—money if he be an industrial, and victory if he be a soldier. But money and victory are merely the keys to ulterior ends, and those ulterior ends remain elusive for him throughout. He dies still making money, or, if he be a victorious soldier, weeps like Alexander because there are no more worlds to conquer. His one care is that the business or the army which he has organised shall be efficiently administered; he is hard on his administrators. Above all, he values the habit of discipline; his machine must answer promptly to the lever.

The organiser inevitably comes to look upon men as his tools. His is the inverse of the mind of the idealist, for he would move men in brigades and must therefore have regard to material limitations, whereas the idealist appeals to the soul in each of us, and souls are winged and can soar. It does not follow that the organiser is careless of the well-being of the society beneath him; on the contrary, he regards that society as so much man-power to be maintained in efficient condition. This is true whether he be militarist or capitalist, provided that he be far-sighted. In the sphere of politics the organiser views men as existing for the State—for the 'Leviathan' of the Stuart philosopher Hobbes. But the Democratic Idealist barely tolerates the State as a necessary evil, for it limits freedom.

In the established Democracies of the West, the ideals of Freedom have been transmuted into the prejudices of the average citizen, and it is on these 'habits of thought' that the security of our freedom depends, rather than on the passing ecstasies of idealism. For a thousand years such prejudices took root under the insular protection of Britain; they are the outcome of continuous experiment, and must be treated at least with respect, unless we are prepared to think of our forefathers as fools. One of these prejudices is that it is unwise to take an Expert as Minister of State. In the present time of War, when freedom even in a democracy must yield to efficiency, there are those who would have us say that the experts whom we have for the time being installed in some of the high offices should be succeeded henceforth by experts, and that our prejudice is antiquated. None the less even in war time Britain has returned to a Civilian Minister for War! The fact is, of course, that the inefficiencies of the normally working British Constitution are merely the obverse of the truth that democracy is incompatible with the organisation necessary for war against autocracies. When the present Chilian Minister first came to England he was entertained by some members of the House of Commons. Referring to the Mother of Parliaments, as seen from the far Pacific, and to the chronic grumbling in regard to Parliamentary government which he found on his arrival in London, he exclaimed, 'You forget that one of the chief functions of Parliaments is to prevent things being done!'

The thought of the organiser is essentially strategical, whereas that of the true democrat is ethical. The organiser is thinking how to use men; but the democrat is thinking of the rights of men, which rights are so many rocks in the way of the organiser. Undoubtedly the organiser must be a master, for, given the waywardness of human nature and the inveteracy of habit, he would make little progress otherwise. But he is a bad supreme master, because of his 'ways and means' mind.

The Nemesis of democratic idealism, if it break from the bonds of reality, is the supreme rule of the organiser and of blind efficiency. The organiser begins innocently enough; his executive mind revolts from the disorder, and above all from the indiscipline around him. Soldierly efficiency undoubtedly saved Revolutionary France. But such is the impetus of the going concern, that it sweeps forward even its own creator. To improve the efficiency of his man-power he must in the end seek to control all its activities—working and thinking, no less than fighting. He is in supreme command, and inefficiency is pain to him. Therefore Napoleon added to his Grand Army and his Code Civil, also his Concordat with the Papacy, whereby the priest was to become his servant. He might have enjoyed lasting peace after the Treaty of Amiens, but must needs continue to prepare war. Finally he was impelled to his Moscow, just as a great money maker will overreach himself and end in bankruptcy.

Bismarck was the Napoleon of the Prussians, their man of blood and iron, yet he differed from his French prototype in certain regards which, for our present purpose, are worth attention. His end was unlike the end of Napoleon. There was no banishment to Elba after a Moscow, no imprisonment in St. Helena after a Waterloo. True that, after thirty years at the helm, the old pilot was dropped in 1890 by a new captain with a mind to piracy, but it was because of his caution and not because of vaulting ambition. Both Napoleon and Bismarck had supreme minds of the 'ways and means' order, but there was something more in Bismarck. He was not merely the great business man, which is Emerson's description of Napoleon. No statesman ever adjusted war to policy with a nicer judgment than Bismarck. He fought three short and successful campaigns, and made three treaties of peace, from each of which ensued a harvest of advantage to Prussia. Yet what different treaties they were! After the War of 1864 against Denmark, Bismarck took Sleswig and Holstein, with the idea, beyond question, of a Kiel Canal. After the War of 1866 against Austria he refused to take Bohemia, and thereby so offended his King that they were not fully reconciled until after the victories of 1870. There can be no doubt that in this clemency Bismarck foresaw a time when Prussia might need the alliance of Austria. In 1871, after Sedan and the Siege of Paris, Bismarck yielded to the pressure of the military party, and took Lorraine as well as Alsace.

The great Chancellor had, in truth, what the Prussian, as a rule, lacks, an insight into the minds of other nations than his own. His methods were psychological by preference. Once he had achieved German unity under Prussia, he waged no more wars. Yet he accomplished great things—for a time he ruled Europe—and his method was no mere exploitation of military prestige. At the Berlin Congress of 1878 he secured the occupation of the provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina for Austria, and thereby deepened the rivalry of Austria and Russia in the Balkan Peninsula. At the same Berlin Congress he privately incited France to occupy Tunis, and when France presently effected that occupation, Italy, as he foresaw, was sharply wounded. The Dual Alliance with Austria followed in 1879, and the Triple Alliance with Austria and Italy in 1881. It was as though he had sent his sheep-dog round his flock to drive his sheep to him. By subtleties of the same order he antagonised France and Britain, and also Britain and Russia. So, too, did he deal in his domestic policy. In 1886 he ceased from struggling with the Vatican, and brought over the Catholic party to his support, thereby neutralising the socialist tendency in the industrial but Catholic Province of the Rhineland, and the particularist tendency in the Catholic kingdom of Bavaria in the south.

The true parallel is to be drawn not between Napoleon and Bismarck, but between Napoleon and the entire Prussian ruling caste. The end of that caste, which we are now witnessing, is like the end of Napoleon; the blindly organising man goes to his Moscow, and the blindly organising State to its Armageddon. Kultur is the name given to that philosophy and education which imbued a whole race with the 'ways and means' mind. The French are an artistic, and therefore an idealistic people; Napoleon prostituted their idealism with the glory of his genius. Bismarck, on the other hand, was the child of materialistic Kultur, but, greater than the average of his race, he could reckon also with spiritual forces.

Kultur had its origin not in the victories of Frederick the Great, but in the defeat of Jena. The rule of Frederick in the eighteenth century was a personal rule like that of Napoleon, whereas the Prussia of the nineteenth century, behind whatever other pretence, was governed by an oligarchy of intellectual 'Experts'—staff officers, bureaucrats, professors. Frederick, sole organiser, raised only administrators, with the result that when he died he left Prussia a mere mechanism, to be broken on the field of Jena.

In the very winter of Jena the philosopher Fichte came to lecture in Berlin, while it was still in the occupation of the French. There was no University in the Prussian capital of those days, and the lectures were delivered not to young students, but to the maturest brains of the country in the fever of a great crisis. Fichte taught the philosophy of Patriotism at a time when the German Universities were devoted to the abstract worship of knowledge and art. In the next few years, between 1806 and 1813, was established that close connection between the army, the bureaucracy, and the schools, or, in other words, between the needs of government and the aims of education, which constituted the essence and perverse strength of the Prussian system. Universal military service was corre with universal compulsory schooling, inaugurated in Prussia two generations before the English Education Act of 1870; the University of Berlin, with a brilliant professoriate, was established as sister to the Great General Staff. Thus knowledge in Prussia was no longer pursued mainly for its own sake, but as a means to an end, and that end was the success of a State which had experienced bitter disaster. It was a Camp-State, moreover, in the midst of a plain, without the natural bulwarks of a Spain, a France, or a Britain. The end determines the means, and since the Prussian end was military strength, based of necessity on stark discipline, the means were inevitably materialistic. Judged from the standpoint of Berlin, it was a wonderful thing to have impressed Kultur, or Strategical mentality, on the educated class of a whole people, but from the standpoint of civilisation at large it was a fatal momentum to have given to a nation—fatal, that is to say, in the long run, either to civilisation or that nation.